Case Number 10232: Small Claims Court

OLYMPIA: THE LENI RIEFENSTAHL ARCHIVAL COLLECTION

The Charge

A festival of the nations, a festival of beauty ...

The Case

It's impossible -- or, at best, inadvisable -- to write about a Leni
Riefenstahl film without some kind of acknowledgment of her fateful entanglement
with Hitler and the Nazi party. For some, dealing with this aspect of her life
is as easy as a simple condemnation: she made Nazi propaganda, so she's evil.
Others try to separate her art from her politics, saying that we should analyze
her technique without regard to the actual content of the films or her personal
beliefs. After a few years of research, discussion, papers, and just plain
thinking on Riefenstahl, I can't see any way out of her ethical case that is so
easy. Neither a blanket condemnation nor a blind acceptance of Riefenstahl's
work does justice to the troubling complexity of her particular morality tale --
perhaps the most sobering one involving an artist in the 20th Century. In my
simplest possible articulation, I think she was an artistic genius so fixated on
aesthetics and her own talent that she committed severe political negligence.
Two factors mostly beyond her control tragically compounded this mistake -- the
enormity of her own talent that would brand her pro-Nazi works into cultural
memory, and the sheer magnitude of human suffering that the men she promoted
would come to inflict on the world. A third factor within her control,
her stubborn refusal to accept any blame, sealed her fate and effectively ended
her career. To prevent this review from stretching into oblivion, I will stop
there. But for a fascinating exploration of Riefenstahl's unique guilt and
brilliance, featuring the 90-something woman herself, see Ray Müller's 1993
documentary The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl.

As for Olympia itself, I honestly cannot see much glaring Nazi
propaganda in this documentary of the 1936 summer Olympics in Berlin. Triumph
of the Will, being a film of a party rally commissioned by Hitler himself,
is obviously full of it, but apart from some shots of Hitler watching the games
and the German flag (which, under the Third Reich, bore a swastika), one would
hardly know that the games happened in Nazi Germany. From what I can tell -- and
my knowledge of that particular Olympics does not really extend much beyond this
film -- Riefenstahl does not even greatly favor Germany in her editing. I'm sure
she covers most of the events that Germany wins (as any filmmaker would when her
home country is hosting), but she also includes plenty of scenes of the Aryan
pretty boys getting trounced, even when the trouncing is done by
African-American track superstar Jesse Owens. Her camera lingers on him almost
tenderly as he grins with pride after winning a gold medal -- not the stylistic
choices one would expect from "Nazi propaganda." I give some credence
to Susan Sontag's famous argument about Riefenstahl's "fascist
aesthetics" and the "cult of the body beautiful," but propaganda
is by definition blatant and Sontag's accusation is too subtle to justify that
label for a work like Olympia. In retrospect, some of the then-innocent
moments are quite sad -- like the line of French soldiers heil-ing
Hitler, who would soon punish their army on the battlefield and occupy their
country.

There is no denying that the film is jaw-droppingly gorgeous and endlessly
innovative. Many of the modern cinematic conventions for sports coverage (and
Nike commercials, for that matter) were invented by Riefenstahl and her crew --
they dug pits to get ultra-low angles on pole vaulting athletes, brought their
cameras underwater to capture swimming and diving, and commissioned special
cameras and lenses that would maximize their coverage of fast-paced,
unpredictable events. Riefenstahl, a professional dancer and renowned mountain
climber, probably could have qualified for some of the events herself, but
instead she transforms the very filming of this event into a sport. Like the
athletes, she gives 110 percent. The opening sequence is fondly remembered: a
rather abstract visualization of the spirit of the games, it is a long montage
set to music with no dialogue. Riefenstahl shows us Greek columns and statues,
evocatively rendered in contrasting light and shadow, then strapping young men
and women, partially nude, celebrating the grace of their own bodies with dance
and sport.

Riefenstahl strikes a nice balance between top-notch sports coverage (for
the time) and an artistic depiction of athletic beauty. For some events --
mostly track and field -- we follow the action with great suspense, wanting to
see who wins. For others -- the marathon, fencing, and diving -- we are drawn
more into the poetry of bodies in motion than the heat of competition. Our move
from the former concern to the latter -- paralleled by the change from
"festival of the nations" to "festival of beauty" in the
titles of parts one and two -- begins with the men's, umm, "stick
throwing" competition. They throw their sticks -- or javelins, if you must
-- but we do not see the result, only their faces watching, or isolated shots of
the sticks flying through the air. The marathon that ends Part One masterfully
creates the mood of dizzying exhaustion that begins to affect the athletes.
Riefenstahl employs slow motion, extreme close-ups of hands, feet, and faces,
and a disorienting shot looking down on running feet to render this feeling.
Slow-motion shots here and elsewhere are sometimes reminiscent of the early
Muybridge experiments in the late 19th Century that sought to slow time and put
motion under a microscope. From the runners in the mist that open Part Two,
through the fencing shadows, and to the balletic diving finale, the second half
truly is a "festival of beauty" in its own right. If the film feels
long and padded (coming in at almost three-and-a-half hours), these moments make
the waiting worthwhile.

Finally, here are a few random things I learned from Olympia: *
Canadians suck at the high jump. * Rachel Griffith has a clone who
competed in the 1936 Summer Olympics. * German women gather by the
hundreds to do synchronized calisthenics in big empty fields each morning,
* Leni Riefenstahl had an eye for perfect breasts -- and probably perfect boy
parts, too, but I'm no expert on those! * Male Olympic athletes like to
skinny dip together and give each other naked massages. * Germans love
David Hasselhoff (actually, I might have picked this one up somewhere else).

Sadly, the picture and sound quality here do not do justice to the beauty of
the film. The image generally looks overexposed and has moderate levels of
scratching and dirt. There is also an irritating tiny black border with white
distortion in its top left corner that surrounds the image. The sound feels
tinny and hollow most of the time. Clearly, this is a very old film, but I was
still disappointed in the quality of the transfer here.

In some ways, the extras are generous, including two additional
documentaries only tangentially related to Olympia: Jugend der
Welt, a 30-minute parallel documentary on the Winter Games that year, and
Die Kamera Fahrt Mit, a 12-minute propagandistic film from that period
about the range of documentary filming completed in Nazi Germany. Picture
quality is extremely poor on the former, with far too much contrast and bad
focus. The second film, which includes narration, suffers also from a persistent
tapping on the soundtrack. There are quite a few deleted and alternate scenes,
including a five-minute "Olympia Oath" segment that has some very nice
imagery, with flocks of birds and the sun behind the Olympic flame. This and the
other scenes appear to come from the Italian version, making their content
particularly Italy-focused (meaning that they show events Italy does well in
which Riefenstahl did not include in her cut). The whole concept of deleted
scenes probably sends Riefenstahl spinning in her freshly-dug grave, though,
considering how critical she was of her own material -- anything she didn't
include, I'm sure she wouldn't want publicly shown. The photo gallery shows some
stills from the film, but also some nice shots of Riefenstahl directing --
director Ray Müller, who knew her quite well, told my German documentary
class at Berkeley last week that "she isn't a woman -- she's a general in
disguise," and one can really see that in these photos. The biography is
kind of a whitewash, far too generous and groveling to Riefenstahl to be very
helpful, and not well translated. The on-screen essay is somewhat more
objective, and is brief and historically informative. Don't expect any brilliant
insights here, though. What's missing from the extras is a featurette analyzing
the film on an artistic level, interviewing a few film scholars, and maybe even
touching on the web of ethical issues surrounding Riefenstahl. It is such an
important work in film history that Pathfinder should have found some money to
produce such a thing.